Electronic content (hereinafter “content”) is increasingly used by society to perform services and to provide information. Accordingly, as services are upgraded and information changes, content must be updated. The update content may include updated information (e.g., news updates, weather reports, stock updates, new magazine articles and the like) or updated products and services (e.g., software updates, bug fixes, new software products, recently released videos, television episodes, or songs, upgrades to email and internet services, subscriptions to view or use content provided by a website, and the like). Generally, update content may be delivered to a client computing device using one or more of a plurality of forms of computer readable media. For example, computer readable storage media which includes updated content may be used to deliver the updated content to the client computing device. Alternatively, the update content may be provided via one or more data communication networks, such as the internet. Several different formatting techniques are available for embodying updated content in each of the plurality of forms of computer readable media. As a result of the multitude of options for formatting and delivering updated content to a client computing device, content consumers (e.g., users of the client computing devices) are burdened with a plurality of inconsistent update experiences (required interactions by the content consumer to receive the update content).
Because software and hardware are frequently updated to comply with rapid improvements in technology, providing content related to software and hardware updates is particularly burdensome for both content consumers, including end-users and organization administrators, and content providers, such as independent software vendors (ISVs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), and/or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Since the internet allows information to be provided quickly and globally, the internet is often used to by content providers to distribute updates or other content to a large number of content consumers. However, many small content providers are focused on development of their core product and lack the operations team and server infrastructure necessary to manage a distribution system on an internet scale. Moreover, even when content providers have the resources to distribute the updates via the internet, the content providers require content consumers to use content-specific or provider-specific software programs or to visit particular web sites or in order to receive the updated content. Accordingly, content provided by each content provider involves a specific update experience. Because end-users are interested in receiving software and hardware updates from a plurality of different content providers, content consumers must navigate through a plurality of update experiences in order to receive the updated software and hardware content. Likewise, corporate content consumers lack a single unified automatic update distribution system for all products used in their organization. Administrators must seek out updates for each software and hardware product and import the updates into their system.
Thus, a need exists, for a unified distribution infrastructure which can be used by all content providers to provide their updates to content consumers via a single update experience.